The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (19)

Amber shivered. She wasn’t cold.

“Tell me why you want to do this,” Meoraq said without opening his eyes.

“God wants to know?”

“I suspect He already knows.” He sounded very faintly annoyed. “Yet I am compelled to ask anyway. Answer.”

“Because you’re mine and I want to make you happy in every possible way.”

“I have always been happy without this act,” he said, but it was a grudging admission.

“I still want to share it with you.”

“And if I say it is an offense?”

“Then I won’t ask you again.”

His brows knitted heavily over his closed eyes. “So you don’t really want to do it.”

“Right this instant, it’s probably the thing I want most to do in the world, but I’m not going to do it if it offends your god.”

His eyes slid open just to slits. “You don’t believe in God.”

“You do.”

“You have tried often enough to convince me otherwise, but you will not do so now with your human mating rituals?”

“Whether or not I believe in your god is irrelevant. I’m trying to make love with you. It can’t be making love if you think it’s corrupting you.”

Meoraq tipped his head back and gazed, not at the ceiling where human feet were once again loudly tromping, but through it and straight on to heaven. Looking God in the eye, perhaps.

And if so…she found herself wondering if this was the strangest prayer He’d ever been asked to mediate.

“Yes,” said Meoraq.

Amber started. “What?”

He looked at her, gestured at his cock. “The will I receive has not changed. No pleasure we find in one another offends the eye of God. You may do as you wish.”

She stared at him for a while, then up at the ceiling and back at him.

He grimaced at her, an expression which was never going to grace the covers of one of those sultry bodice-rippers her mom had like to read (and which was far more likely, come to think of it, to be found on the splash page of a horror comic), but something in it made that not-cold shiver come right back, even harder than before. Amber rolled onto her knees and arched up to kiss him, to feel his dry tongue prod at hers and his fingers comb carefully through her hair, and it was beautiful, like the heat and pulse of his cock when she gripped it, like the musky sweet taste that coated his sa’ad, like the orgasm that swept through her when she brushed her lips across the head of him and heard his rich, full groan. She did not drink him in with the pleasure she’d imagined, but with joy beyond all imagining, right up until he fell out of the chair.

Footsteps on the ceiling. Meoraq panting on the floor. Amber watched him, giggling now and then when the happiness threatened to split her in half, and finally draped herself across his chest and thighs where she could both snuggle platonically and fondle him at the same time.

“Say something,” she said at last.

“God is in His heaven,” said Meoraq in a distant voice. “And loves me.”

Zhuqa had said something like that once. This time, it was beautiful.

 

8

 

They were a frustrating six days that followed. Meoraq’s limited healing lore had always served him well in the past, or at least, that part of the past which did not include his Amber. It was not the alien workings of her body that concerned him now—that, he was content to leave to Sheul and He seemed to have mended it. No, what he did not know how to manage was his woman’s spirit, and in particular, her will to leap from her sickbed and be immediately whole.

Amber’s long lying-in had left her weakened and restless. Six days was not enough to restore her to her fullest, but it was all she would allow.

He had sympathy. Some. No one liked to lie around and be tended, and certainly no one enjoyed being reminded that they were any less than what they had been, what they should be. His Amber’s fierce will chafed at inactivity. It was no less than a punishment to her and Meoraq understood that feeling. He also understood, as his wife apparently did not, that overworking weakened flesh only slowed one’s recovery and that the mistakes made while in that state could cripple his woman for life.

He explained this. She claimed to accept it. And then she refused out of hand his suggestion of meditation and stretches, even for one day, and instead began a regime of climbing the stairs over and over. Before the day was out, she had set the goal of walking all the way to the stream and back, and achieved it despite his warnings. Was he surprised? He was not, not even the next morning, when she wanted to hunt.

Meoraq had only a few moments to think that over without arousing her suspicion, but the facts were simple enough. Point: If he denied her request and left without her, she would likely begin again with her own idea of how best to recover. Point the second: She was equally likely to go hunting without him. Point the third (and most significant): At least one and perhaps all three of the human males in his camp had eyes on her. Meoraq did not believe any of them would dare to attempt conquest and he did not doubt Amber’s ability, however weakened, to put a scar on them if they did, but it was a point and worth the consideration.

So he took her hunting. All that day and all the days that followed, he led his woman on long walks, well away from any game trails or spoor, and let her believe herself hunting. He lost hours to her stubbornness that could have been spent packing his lodge back onto the sled, but then again, even when there were no animals to track, there were plenty of trees to lean up against.

Exercise was exercise.

On the seventh morning following Amber’s emergence from her sickbed, Meoraq woke early with too much to do. He nuzzled his wife all the way awake, since there was no hope of escaping the cupboard without disturbing her anyway, and told her to be ready to leave within the hour.

“Got it,” she mumbled, rolling over to spread herself out over the bed as he left it. “Gonna sleep a little bit, be right up, okay?”

He grunted assent, patting her fluffy head, and shut the door quietly. After a few short stretches and his morning prayer—my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the shelter of this lodge and its civilized cupboard which is half the size of mine at home, and my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the woman who shares it with me and has not failed once in fifty-nine nights by her own reckoning to hup her bony knee into my groin—he went upstairs.

The foreroom of the underlodge was empty at the moment, although someone had moved the sled on which he had half-heartedly packed their provisions. Leaning close to straighten them, Meoraq smelled the unmistakable tang of sex. Damned humans. Now every time he put the walls up, he was going to think about that.

He opened the door and pulled the sled outside, facing into the wind to clear his scent cavities. It was not quite dawn, although the sky was greying in the east. A fine morning, dry and cool. A good day for travel.

He was not alone.

Meoraq stiffened, fighting the urge to hiss. He did not turn to look at her, did not hear her little footfall or catch more than the usual smoky scent in the breeze, but he knew who it was with him and he saw no reason to pretend otherwise. “What do you want, N’ki?”

“You told Amber you wanted to leave.”

“In an hour. Wait below.”

“Can’t I help?”

“Don’t insult me. You wouldn’t lift your hand to help if it were resting on live coals. What do you want? Speak plainly.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Nothing.” Meoraq busied himself with the sled, re-stacking things that did not require adjustment and tightening straps he was going to have to untie and fasten again when the rest of the gear was loaded. Anything to keep his hands busy so they would not be tempted to strike.

“When this is over, I mean. You can’t—” Her hand caught at his sleeve.

He slapped it off. Hard. But at least he only struck her hand.

“You can’t leave me,” she said in her shaking voice. Her eyes filled with water. “Please, Meoraq.”

“Don’t say my name like that and don’t you dare cry at me,” he added, pointing the whole of his hand right into her flat, ugly face. “I am not my wife, to be caught and reined by the little water you run out of your eyes.”

She did not answer, but her eyes dried in the wind and did not tear up again.

“You sicken me,” he spat, yanking at the sled’s ties. “But you are my wife’s blood-kin and so I will take you into my House.”

“Thank y—”

“Thank her, not that you ever would. I can only pray that one day she will see you for what you are, but until then, know that my eyes are open. You’ll come to my House, yes, and I’ll shut you behind as many doors as I can and if God shows favor, neither she nor I will ever see your face or hear your whining voice again!”

“Perhaps you can find a cage to put me in.”

“Don’t you dare hook that at me!” he hissed. “You’ll have a room, human. You’ll have your meals brought and baths at your pleasure and all manner of comforts, ha, and you won’t even have to ply a man’s slit to get them.”

It was, in truth, a low thing for any man to say, and despicable in the throat of a Sheulek. Still, he did not expect the slap. It caught him right across the snout with a flat, undramatic sound, and although it didn’t sting much, it briefly whitened his vision on that side.

He recoiled to stare at her. She neither excused herself nor asked forgiveness—would that have made a difference?—but just stared back at him, her chin raised, defiant. And why shouldn’t she be defiant? She knew he wouldn’t strike her back. Because of Amber.

“Go below,” he said at last. He could feel the color throbbing in his neck, but his voice was calm. “I am done with you.”

She made a sniffing sound, jerking her head as she turned so that her hair snapped a bit, as in a short gust of wind. The sight, the sound, sparked a flare of such rage that his hand went to his waist, gripping at the air where the hilt of his kzung should be, if only he were wearing it. His head cleared after a few slow breaths, but while it lasted, the killing urge was bitterly welcome.

‘Patience,’ he told himself, and made his empty hands go back to work. ‘Great Sheul, O my Father, help me to remember that my wife loves the useless little poke.’

And if she had the power to hear those thoughts, they would have been as good as a knife in her belly. He remembered only too well the look on Amber’s face when she had seen her Nicci again, and he knew he had done nothing since to keep the fire of that first joy lit. Even now, knowing all that his wife had suffered and all that it would mean to her to see him at least trying to show her blood-kin some small friendship, the only kindness he could muster was to stay where he was instead of chasing after her and slapping an apology out of her whining mouth.

He hated Nicci. Even before she’d put her hand on him in that evil way, he’d hated her. She was no worse than any other human he endured with far better grace. Indeed, she was quieter than most, which should have made her far more tolerable. She wasn’t. He hated her.

Footsteps on the stair, uneven in gait but familiar. Meoraq raised his head and flared his spines, grunting a wordless greeting. Amber yawned back at him and sat down on the sled. “Morning,” she said.

He glanced at the sun, still touching the horizon. “Almost.”

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You look pissed.”

He grunted.

“Hey. Come here.”

He eyed the bundled leather walls she patted so invitingly, leather that some other human had already perfumed with…fluids…and straightened up. “You come to me,” he ordered, slapping lightly at his chest.

She did, rolling her eyes but smiling as she slipped her arms around him. “It’s almost over,” she murmured.

He acknowledged this, rubbing at her back and gazing meditatively into the distance, into the east. The shrine was there, so close. He had more fingers than days left in this journey. Sheul awaited him. Sheul, manifest as flesh.

“I could hunt,” he said, already feeling the futility seep into the air. “One good hunt to leave here. You and I could go on together. The humans could wait here for us.”

Amber frowned, but did seem to think it over.

“If that’s what you want to do—” she began at last. Meoraq finished it with her, each in their own tongue, “—I’ll wait here with them. No,” he said at the end and hissed under his breath.

She said nothing for a time, only held him. At length, softly, she said, “Do you want me to talk to them about something?”

“No.”

“Do you want to put off leaving for another day?”

“No.”

He felt her fingers drumming against his scales as she thought.

“Want to fool around before we go?”

He drew back far enough to see if she was serious. She was. And even though that changed absolutely nothing, his mood immediately lightened from the choking black it had been to, oh, a dull sort of grey. “Yes,” he said, releasing her. “Go get the flask. We’ll fill it on the way back.”

“And they say men can’t multitask.” She stood up on her toe-tips and pressed her mouthparts to his snout. “It’s almost over,” she said again. “Try to remember that, okay?”

He grunted and watched her go back downstairs, trying for her sake to find some hidden reserve of patience and goodwill. It was almost over, that was truth, and he shared responsibility for how it ended. When he overheard Amber telling his children the tale of this pilgrimage, he did not want to hear the words, “…and your father acted like a bitch the whole way back.”

Someday, he really had to find out what that meant, exactly.

He could hear Amber coming back already, talking over her shoulder in a gratifyingly terse tone. He met her at the door of the underlodge, caught her by Lady Uyane’s fine green girdle and pulled her to him, pushing his snout hard against her skin all the way up her throat and down again. He kept her there, just for a moment, not thinking but only breathing her in. When he released her, it was with a hiss and a sigh of surrender.

“I am the master of this camp,” he told her. “And I could be a better one. We’ll move on, Soft-Skin. All of us.”

Her furry brows arched. “Does that mean we’re not fooling around?”

“It does not.” He took the flask away from her and started walking. “Come.”

“That’s the goal, lizardman.”

“Eh?”

“Nothing.” She caught his hand and held it as she walked beside him, inexplicably grinning. “It’s so nice to know that no matter what else happens, I’ll always have moments like this…when you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m saying.”

“This makes you happy?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

Meoraq thought that over and shrugged his spines. “If it makes you any happier, I have at least one of those moments nearly every day.”

Her smile widened. “Guess that means we’re married, huh?”

The last of his dark mood blew away like smoke in Sheul’s good, cleansing wind. He put his arm around her. “I suppose it does.”

 

* * *

 

The land which would eventually be known as the Ruined Reach had once been among the greatest lands of Gann. Images preserved from that time showed its cities, like pools of glittering light, reaching north as far as the ice deserts and south into the Green Sea. The Prophet wrote much of life in that land, of its loss and of the sins which had made that loss so necessary, and of the poison that had so permeated its soil after the Fall that he warned no man should seek it. Long after the Prophet’s death, one of the Advocates had decreed that the land had healed enough that those seeking pilgrimage in that land had liberty to do so, but in keeping with the spirit of the Prophet’s warning, no road had ever been built that led into the Reach, not even to Xi’Matezh, mere days out of holy Chalh.

Yet with Lord Uyane’s directions and fair weather, the remainder of the journey passed without difficulty. Meoraq’s humans were inclined to be obedient, or at least unobtrusive, and easily managed. Nicci shared his tent and there was nothing he could do about that, but a tent wasn’t much privacy anyway. And it was only for a few more days. He had already decided to demand another tent on his return visit to Chalh and give it to Nicci. Also a bedroll, blanket and even a cushion. Anything to keep her from robbing Amber of her comforts.

Patience, Uyane. Patience for another day. The doors of Xi’Matezh would open and he must not pass them with anger in his heart.

Days passed. He did not count them, although he meditated each night on a new horizon and felt the soil softening beneath his boots. He tasted salt on the wind and felt the damp of the ocean long before he saw it. And when he saw it…

It had been there before him most of that last day, but the glimpses of greyish green he could see through the branches were not worth the inevitable stumble as his feet caught in the clutter of Gedai’s trees. He knew it was the ocean, the end of his journey. He knew it was a marvelous sight, utterly unknown in the city of his birth. He also knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

So when Nicci lost her footing and spilled herself down a sandy slope onto a fallen log, Meoraq called camp, meaning to stay through the night even though the afternoon had scarcely started. He felt no great sense of time lost in doing this—what was another day, more or less?—but considered it a test of his resolve to show patience. In that mind, he sent Amber away with the empty flask and knelt to inspect the injury, ha, of Nicci’s scuffed knee and bruised arm.

Amber returned in mere moments, the flask just as empty. She let it drop. “Come and see this.”

The three human males and Amber’s own Nicci sat around her, but Amber said this only to him.

Meoraq went and through the trees, not twenty paces from his camp, the forest broke and the ground dropped away. They stood at the top of a cliff, nearly sheer, six times the height of any city wall, plummeting down onto a deadly mash of rock and steel and ruin, sloping away over a wide swath of rust-colored sand, and there was the ocean at the end of it.

He had seen pictures. He had thought that would prepare him, that he could see the ocean and somehow still know how he fit beside it. But there it was and it was as deep as sight would go, so vast that it became the horizon, so entire that he could see the very curve of the world along its skin.

He did not think to look for the temple in that first moment. He did not think at all. Uyane Meoraq beheld the naked body of Gann—its breathing lung, its beating heart, its pregnant belly—and forgot his own entirely until Amber took his hand.

He looked at it, anchored suddenly into his own clay’s dimensions, and then at her. She did not meet his eye. She, too, was lost in the sea.

He looked back into the ocean and was at once dizzied. The way it moved restlessly toward him…it felt as though he were falling and there was nothing to grab at, no hope of rescue. He felt that he could fall along that undulating skin forever until he slipped up into the sky. He looked and saw Gann pressed to Sheul’s heaven with nothing between them, no difference at all.

“Is it…beautiful?” he asked uncertainly.

“I don’t know.” She hesitated and shifted a little closer. “I don’t like it. It’s too high. And everything down there…looks dead. I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never been to the beach before. This wasn’t what I imagined.”

“Hell, no,” Crandall announced.

They both turned, and just why he should be surprised to see the others, Meoraq truly did not know, but he was, as much as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Crandall crossed his arms back and forth in front of his chest, shaking his head for emphasis. “Hell, no,” he repeated. “The joy ride ends here. I am not climbing down that. Bull-shit.”

Meoraq looked again at the cliff, but not for long. The height, the eroded fingers of the ruins pointing out of the sand, the constant swallowing sound of the sea—the single glance that Meoraq took found its way to his belly and knotted there.

“You and the lizard can do what you want,” Crandall was saying. “I ain’t killing myself so he can plant a tree in Israel or whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”

“Relax, man. There has to be another way down.”

“Says who? Don’t you ever watch the travel shows? Since when do they ever put temples where any old asshole can walk in?”

“Hey, Bierce.” Eric reached toward Amber, visibly thought better of it when Meoraq looked at him, then settled for pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”

Meoraq looked along the top of the cliff, since that was where Eric seemed to be pointing, but saw nothing except the same thick forest they had been struggling through for days. Yet Amber actually gasped, her hand clenching where she still held his. So Meoraq looked again, at the treeline this time and then the treetops and finally at Amber, who was looking back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“You don’t see it, do you?” she said.

He looked a third time, squinting as if through smoke and darkness and driving rain, but saw only the same close growth of trees, too tall and thin for Meoraq’s comfort, almost black against the grey sky. With a little imagination, he could see a thousand, thousand crooked fingers, pointing in defiance at the God that had judged this land and found it wanting, but he could not see a temple.

Even when she pointed, he saw nothing but another tree, a little taller than the rest, but no more or less remarkable than any other. But where the others were wrapped in years of parasitic growth, dripping creepers and grasses that would have had no chance at life on the sunless forest floor, this tree stood naked, branchless, burnt black. A dead tree then, and yet he could see by Amber’s face that it was more.

“I cry,” he said. “What is it?”

“I…It…I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Eric, shading his eyes in an effort to see the thing better. “But it sure looks like a transmission tower to me. Sheesh. Wouldn’t that just chap Scott’s ass?”

 

* * *

 

The walls that surrounded Xi’Matezh had been raised, it was said, by the Prophet’s own Oracle Mykrm, and his mark was said to have been carved on the very last stone to be set. Meoraq looked for it as they circled around in search of entry, but with only half an eye. There was so much else to see. The curious color of the stone—nearly black, mottled through with grey and green—made it all but impossible to see through the thick trees. Meoraq had never made a formal study of stone, but all the rock he saw beneath his feet was of that pale, flaking kind; this stone had been quarried elsewhere, brought for the singular purpose of enclosing this sacred place, and the sight of it did his weary clay great good.

They were beautiful walls, deceptively plain, perfectly molded. At one time, there must have been gates, but the damp corrosive air had claimed them and they had not been replaced. It gave him a twinge of disappointment, seeing that anyone could walk in, and he had to stop there in the opening with his neck bent until he had reminded himself that Sheul’s house was open to all His children. The inner doors, those were the true test.

“Are we going in or are we standing here all day?”

“Dude, just give him his space. This is a big deal for him.”

“Yeah, yeah. Lizardman’s gotta get right with the Big Liz. Meanwhile, I’m freezing my nuts off.”

Six breaths, deep and slow. One for the Prophet, who had been the first to enter these ruins and hear the true voice of God within. Two for his Brunt, who had surrendered everything, even his own name, to serve others in faithfulness and humility. Three for Uyane, the first Sword, father of his own line. Four for Mykrm, the hammer, who had raised the first true cities under Sheul and taught men to rule them fairly. Five for Oyan, who carried seedlings across the ruin of the Fallen world and brought life out of the poisoned earth. Six for Thaliszr, priest and healer, who had brought the man Lashraq out of death and restored him as Sheul’s own Prophet.

Meoraq raised his head and crossed through the gateless portal into Xi’Matezh.

He saw the ruins at once, ruins he had every reason to expect to see, ruins he had no right to resent now that they were before him. There were several buildings within the walls, much eroded by the ocean air, windowless, doorless, lifeless. He saw the thing the humans called a transmission tower—weathered, but still standing, still humming beneath his hand when he reached out to touch it. He saw no machines, but the courtyard was too well-kept to think none were here, even here.

The next thing he saw was the ocean, which he could see only because of the huge, tumbled hole in that beautiful wall. Not just one or two missing bricks, but a whole length of them, loosened by the constant pounding of the waves on the cliffs or eroded by the wet wind that had pitted so many of these other buildings. If he and his humans all joined hands, they still couldn’t make a line long enough to touch both sides. This fine wall, the life’s work of who knew how many master masons, carried block by block to be raised here under Oracle Mykrm’s own living eye…This beautiful wall was falling.

But beside the hole, Meoraq saw the only thing that really mattered: a dark stone dome enclosing the true shrine and the heavy doors that sealed it. The doors were made of qil, the same as his sabks—a lost metal, from a lost age. Perhaps Oracle Uyane had made the knives from the scraps left after the doors were cast. Perhaps he had always carried a piece of Xi’Matezh with him and never knew it.

“Wife,” said Meoraq, and when she was with him, he began to walk.

“God, there better be wall-to-wall booze and burgers in there,” Crandall said, falling into step at his side.

Meoraq halted. He turned, his head cocked, and thrust his snout into the human’s flat face. “You,” he hissed, raking his gaze across the rest of them as well. “All of you. You wait here. This place is sacred.”

“Oh what the hell, man!” Crandall looked back at his people, then at Meoraq, and finally at Amber. “What, we’re not good enough to see God? We’ve come just as fucking far, haven’t we? Maybe I got some questions too!”

“Stay here,” Meoraq said again and snorted, blowing back the dirty hair from Crandall’s brow. “Look for your abbot’s ship. Wife, come.”

Crandall faced him down for a second or two, but did turn away in the end, pucker-faced and full of color. “Fucking lizard’s pet. Come on, guys. I ain’t standing out in the wind.”

Amber had a special look for him when Meoraq turned back to her, but he didn’t care. He went on ahead to open the outer doors of Xi’Matezh. The hinges were stiff, but they opened, blowing the dank, waxy-scented breath of the temple back at him.

The doors were too heavy to hold indefinitely. Meoraq gave his wife a not-so-subtle nudge with the toe of his boot and let go of them. They immediately began to swing shut, ponderous as doors in a dream, and closed with no more than a muffled whump, trapping them in black.

Meoraq took his pack off and found his lamp and strikers. He waited until his hands steadied before he made a light, and it was all there, just as he’d imagined: a thousand half-burnt candles like a second wall all around him, melted together, stacked one atop the other, like a city made of wax; the Prophet’s mark painted on the wall, renewed by countless pilgrims over the years; the building, not ruined but maintained, a relic outside of time, and the doors, marked with the names of those who had passed through. Meoraq raised the lamp and approached, his hand skimming the air just over the doors until he found one name he knew: Tsazr Dyuun.

“Your teacher?” Amber asked, watching him.

He grunted, his eyes tracing each line of each letter. They were not even, which surprised him some. He remembered Master Tsazr as such a meticulous man, but then making letters was a very different thing from teaching boys to beat one another senseless. Still…

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

He looked at her, his spines flexing forward. In the close air of this place, he could actually hear them flexing, which was so unnerving that he reached up to rub at them. “Why would you say that? I’ve walked across the world, woman!”

She averted her eyes, rolling her shoulders as she hugged herself. “This doesn’t look like much of a temple, is all. It kind of looks like a bunker.”

“Whatever it may have been before the Fall, it became a temple when God entered.” His eye wandered back to Master Tsazr’s name on the wall. “All things change when He enters, Soft-Skin.”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“How can I be? Look there.” He nudged at her arm and pointed to the wall. “The mark of the Prophet. Prophet Lashraq made that mark.”

Amber studied it with a singularly dubious expression. “It looks awfully fresh.”

“It’s been repainted, I’m sure, but he made it first. He was here, Soft-Skin. Here, where I stand.” He dropped his arm and turned to her, holding his lamp before him like a candle-ward. The flame underlit her odd face in unflattering ways; he leaned close and nuzzled at her chin. “Will you stand with me, wife? One more hour?”

“Meoraq…what if—”

He pushed his mouthparts against hers and rubbed them lightly together until she pushed him away, laughing. “Will you stand with me?” he asked again.

“I think my lips are bleeding.”

“Will you?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, I have to say it?” She sighed, wiped her mouth, then suddenly raised both arms and dropped them loudly to her side. “I’m with you,” she said. “I’m always with you. So…open up that door, Meoraq. Let’s do this.”

He smiled, nuzzling her one more time, and put his palm to the lock-plate.

It warmed, clicked twice and began to hum. Lights came slowly to life all around the door, soft white and palest blue. Another click, and then the voice, echoing off the rounded shell of the dome so that it seemed to be speaking directly in Meoraq’s head: “Warning. This is a secure area. All access restricted. Warning. Lethal force authorized.”

“Nuu Sukaga.”

The humming changed pitch. Small vents opened to either side of the door. “Defense imminent. Present mnabed. This is your final warning.”

Amber took a large step back, catching at his arm, but Meoraq was not moved. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said again.

The vents closed. The door opened.

Deep in the darkened room beyond, Sheul the All-Father stood, the sword of war sheathed and the light of wisdom burning in His hand.

 

9

 

Amber never doubted for a moment that she would see a big, empty room and that was just what she saw. But she knew what Meoraq was expecting too, and so she knew what was going to happen next. And oh God, it hurt to see it.

“Father,” he said, and with a flicker and a whine, lights all around the room came wearily to life. As they strengthened, the huge monitor on the far wall lost some of its mirror-like shine, but still Meoraq took two steps toward it before he realized what it was. He stopped, blinking rapidly as he stared first at his reflection and then at hers and then at the rest of the room. There really wasn’t much to see. It was nothing but a reception area, reduced by military design to six angled walls, several banks of computer consoles, one horseshoe-shaped desk with a single chair aimed at the door they’d come in through, two other doors, and of course, the enormous display monitor behind the desk in which the yellow light of Meoraq’s lamp still sparked a ghost-like echo.

He took it all in, plainly puzzled but showing no doubt, no real concern. When Amber hesitated a touch on his arm, he gave her an inquiring glance, but shrugged off her silent sympathy and instead marched over to one of the other doors and nudged the lockplate. It blatted at him but didn’t open. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said, and the door behind Amber hissed shut.

“Locks engaged. Timeout to systems restart. Doors will open in ten and ninety. Present mnabed to override.” The lockplates lit up helpfully, but no one had anything to offer any of them.

Meoraq backed away from the door, looking frustrated but not alarmed, not really. He turned around again, all the way in a circle, as if checking to make sure God hadn’t materialized behind him while he was distracted by the door. He ended up facing Amber and the two of them just looked at each other for a while.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I know.”

“Everyone hears Him!” he insisted, just as if she’d argued. “Everyone! He has to be here! It has to be…some kind of test!” He swung away, holding up his lamp and searching each shadowed, empty corner. “Father?”

The lights pulsed as if in answer and grew that much stronger. The big monitor flickered. Smaller ones evenly spaced around the otherwise featureless walls snapped on, one after the other, showing first a clean black screen and slowly spilling out lines of silent code. Somewhere, speakers thumped on at an ear-splitting level and hummed their way down to something subaudible. “Operational drive activated,” said a lizardish voice. “Systems override. Searching for file. Please wait.”

“There’s no one here,” she said softly.

“He’s here! He has to be here! Maybe…” He turned back, still not panicked, still with that awful bafflement. “Will you pray with me? Maybe we have to pray.”

The big monitor flickered again and pulled up a very obvious load-bar. As it crept toward completion, that cool, androgynous voice came back with, “File recovery in process. Please wait.”

“I’ll pray with you,” said Amber. “Tell me how.”

But he didn’t, not right away. He just looked at her, standing alone in the center of that empty room with the big screen firing up behind him. The lamp in his hand trembled. He looked at her. He did not speak.

Amber gently took the lamp and set it down on the edge of the console nearest to her. He let it go, his eyes fixed to the little flame, but otherwise, he didn’t move, not even when she came back and tried to put her arms around him.

“He didn’t lie to me.”

“Who?”

“Master Tsazr.” Meoraq pulled out of her reach and paced back to the door, pushing at the lockplate twice before going on to the next door. “I saw him. I saw his face! He heard God’s voice! That is truth! It…” His long stride slowed. He looked at her again, lost between one door and the next. “It’s me.”

“No.”

Meoraq’s spines lowered until they were shivering close against his skull, but his back stayed straight and his shoulders squared. His eyes drifted from one computer to another, beginning and ending with the big screen and the nearly-there load-bar. “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” he said, and staggered without ever taking a step.

“Meoraq, don’t. Please, don’t.” She caught his face, made him look at her, but it was a long time before he saw her. “It’s not you, I swear it’s not.” And wildly, because anything was better than this…this awful dead confusion in his eyes, she said, “Maybe it’s me, okay? Maybe women aren’t supposed to come here. You did everything right, Meoraq, you know you did.”

His brows furrowed, the knobby ridges cutting shadows down his lizardish cheeks. “I don’t…know what I did wrong…”

“Recovery complete,” said the voice. The monitor went black and then came to sudden life. It showed a room—this room, she realized. The camera was aimed down at the desk, where a lizardman in a grey and black uniform crouched. He wasn’t sitting, wasn’t standing. There was a chair, but he wasn’t using it. He was just…hunched there, holding onto the desk like it was keeping him on the ground. There was no sound, but lights were going wild all around him in that/this room, making madhouse colors dance across his scales. His mouth was open; his eyes were hell. Slowly, his head turned until he was staring directly at the camera, directly at them.

Meoraq’s hand twitched toward the hilt of his kzung, but he stood his ground. “This is a recording!” he said, and turned in a sudden, curt circle, shouting, “I know the difference! This is just an image! This is not Sheul!”

The picture on the monitor died.

Meoraq glared at it, his mouth flared open, hissing through his teeth. “I am not deceived! I am Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of—”

The picture came back. The same room. The same man. He was sitting now, his eyes staring and glazed. “I want to say that I didn’t know,” he said, and it was the voice that did it. Recognition like a hammer slammed down into Amber’s brain and she suddenly knew him, knew this room, knew that voice. The kiosk in the ruins; Scott and Nicci and everyone standing around to listen while the man in the recording—this man—told them to come to Matezh, that they had to come together, that there was still hope.

Now that man clapped a hand to his brows and clenched it there, shaking his head over and over before suddenly slapping at the desk. “How can I say that?” he cried. “How can any of us say that? After we spent years in development to make sure we got it as virulent and as violent as the science allowed, how can anyone pretend they didn’t know it would end the world?”

Something in the recording sounded a tone. The man looked around at the wall behind him as one of the green lights turned yellow. “Ghedov is gone,” he said, running out to tap at that computer. “I guess Daophith and Jezaana will be next. Saiakr is still sending me the numbers—that’s Technician Raaq Saiakr at Culvsh—and everything is working just the way we planned. I can’t…” He trailed off, staring at the screens, then shook his head again. “I can’t,” he said simply, and switched the recording off.

Amber looked at Meoraq, but he was still frowning at the screen. His spines were flat, but in spite of his obvious confusion and frustration, his neck was still dark.

The image flickered and came back. The same man at the same computer leaned back in the same chair. He was barefooted and naked to the waist, but was still wearing his uniform pants. Behind him, the wall of lights was entirely yellow.

“It’s all over,” he said. “So I guess I should talk about it. For posterity.” He snorted without much humor and bent out of frame, coming back with a bottle. He drank, then rubbed his brows and put the bottle on the desk next to his computer. “For all the people,” he said dryly, “who are going to see this and want to know what happened. So. What happened is, making war makes money. I wish we had a better reason. I wish we had enemies at least, a war that we were making the stuff for…but it was just something we were making. Just our job.”

He drank again, leaning back to put his feet up on the side of the desk, one leg crossed over the other. He looked at the camera, then at the bottle, then snorted again. “Water,” he said. “Enhanced, though. Something else we were working on. Everything the body needs in one bottle. We were all the way into development when that contract was canceled—feeding our soldiers just isn’t as profitable as killing them—so there’s a whole storage cell full of the stuff down below. It’s not bad. Tastes a little like ykara.” He drank some more, then set the bottle aside.

“So what happened?” he asked. “How did all these nice, sane people who designed the annihilation of the world let it get out? It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t even by accident. It was just one of those things, as my daughter would say. Just one of those things. Who knew? Wait.”

He got up and walked out of frame, then came back with a small, black disc-shaped object. He held it up for the camera, then sat it down and tapped it. A second image sprang up, flickering so madly that only the most general outlines could be made out. He tapped through a few different shapes before he stopped and held the disc up. “This is Bsaia,” he said. “She’s thirteen. And if everything happened the way it was supposed to, she died eleven days ago, in the first two hours after the cloud hit. She and her mother—” He tapped back two images. “—Ylati, and our two sons—” Forward one tap. “—Tivon and Uluraq, went to the safe-room of our house as soon as the alarm went out, not knowing that the safe-room’s air circulator is not rated for a Class 5 contaminant. So. Two hours after the cloud hit, one of two things happened. Either our neighbors broke in or Tivon and Uluraq did it themselves, but my wife and my daughter were raped to death, and my sons either killed each other or were killed by one of our neighbors. I honestly don’t know what to hope for.” He looked at the images once more, then switched them off and looked at the camera.

“I keep talking about the cloud like you know what it is. So. Each of our development stations is powered by a geothermic fission system. Safest and most reliable form of power in the world. Cheap, too. Once the fixtures are in place, the generator runs itself, all the way down to the automated maintenance system. The surplus power it puts out pays for its installation before the first year is done, so naturally, only the military knows about it.” The man started to say something else, then laughed curtly and waved it away. “Never mind. I’m sure I’ll come back to that at some point. I’ve got all the time in the world to talk now…there’s just no one left to listen to me.”

The man leaned over his desk and covered his face for several long, brutally indifferent minutes of silent recording before he finally switched the camera off.

Meoraq turned around and went to the door. He hit the lockplate twice. Both times, the door clicked and counted down the minutes for him until the locks would open. He stood rigid, staring into the closed face of the door until, with a curt motion, he looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

Neither did she.

The monitor flickered. Meoraq turned his head a little more, enough to watch the man in the recording lean back in his chair. The bottle was still there beside him. He said, “Safest and most reliable power in the world. I’m sure there’s been a few close calls that I’m not aware of, but there’s never been an accident. The system maintains itself. Under optimum conditions, they say it can run without dumaq intervention for a thousand years. Maybe more. So. The military uses it for all its most sensitive installations. Because it’s so safe. And no one wants these things to get out, remember. No one built them to actually be used. That would just be crazy, right?

“Kunati exploded,” he went on without any change in his tone or expression. “Saiakr says they were working on three major projects, but the Wrath was the only one that seems to have gotten out. I guess the others were incinerated in the blast. I don’t know. I only know no one’s bleeding out their eyes or having their bones turn to jelly while they’re being fucked to death, so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

“Kunati was in a relatively unpopulated area. Protected. No one wanted this stuff to get out.” He snorted, uncapped the bottle, but then capped it again without drinking and just held it restlessly between his hands. “But the virus was designed to be delivered through explosive payload, so when Kunati blew, it did just…just what we built it to do. It turned to vapor and the wind took it away.”

The man gestured back at the wall of yellow lights without looking at it. “Saiakr says, when the virus hit, you could actually see it happen in the way people started fighting. If you were close enough, you could hear it…the roaring…coming in like the tide. He said, in the cities, the fires were opening up like flowers. Blooming. Isn’t that a pretty way to describe the end of the world?”

“Blooms,” said Meoraq, impassive. “I call it, ‘Blooms’.” He looked at the lockplate, pressed it, punched it.

“All of us were locked down by then, of course. Watching the blooms. For the first two days, we were told that it was temporary and we’d all go home as soon as the risk of contamination had dropped to acceptable levels. Like there were acceptable levels. Like none of us knew what the damn thing had been designed to do. And on the third day, a few hours before the cloud reached the capitol, the word came down that we needed to start incinerating the viruses. And firing the bombs. Because—and this was actually what they said—we couldn’t allow Tirazez to fall when the rest of the world still stood. So. So.” He dragged in a deep, shaking breath and looked right at the camera. “So, knowing that billions of people were dead and millions more would be dead by the next day, someone out there loaded up the rest of God’s Wrath and fired it. The whole world…bloomed.”

He looked at the camera stonily for a few more seconds, then switched it off.

“It’s just a recording,” said Amber softly.

Meoraq pressed his palm to the lockplate and rested the top of his head on the door. “I know.”

“It’s awful, but it’ll be all right.”

He glanced at her.

The recording came back on. The man was back. This time, he was entirely naked except for some lizardish underwear. To see him wearing something as flimsy as fabric there instead of a metal loin-plate was a little shocking. “It’s day sixty-three,” he said, dropping into the chair. “It’s late. I was exploring the administration levels today and found some koa, so I’m drunk as fuck. Celebrating,” he added, and raised his empty hand in a salute. “I saw a fire today. Which means someone’s still alive to set one. I lit the outer lamps, but no one’s come yet. I’m still hopeful.” He snorted, muttered, “So hopeful,” under his breath, and laughed.

“Saiakr killed himself this morning,” he said at the end of it, and raised his imaginary cup again. “Or as good as. He’s been talking about it for a while, although he doesn’t call it that. He doesn’t have any enhanced nutrition water at his base, just what comes out of the purifiers, so he’s been eating out of the officers’ lounge all this time. This morning, he brought out the last of it. Then he called me up to say goodbye. Said he was going to eat all he wanted and then take a transport from the garage and start driving. Said he could be here in three days. He said…Contaminant levels are still at ninety-nine percent,” he said suddenly. “But I still saw that fire and thought…”

He bent over, rubbing at his brows, and abruptly laughed. “If he makes it, I’m letting him in,” he announced. “I don’t care if he’s infected or not. Even if he’s fucking me to death, it’s still a living touch, you know? It’s still another person. And it’s still sixty-three days gone and I’m the only one left and I thought, for posterity, I ought to maybe explain how that happened.

“I’m a technician. I maintain the equipment that built the viruses. There are three other technicians that work here, so there’s always one of us on site, but we’re not soldiers. We’re not military. We’re not scientists.” He snorted. “Thank God for the cleaners or we wouldn’t have anyone to bully around. Of course, the cleaners don’t have to have someone on site at all times. Or the scientists. When Kunati blew and the base locked down, we were on dead shift. Ironic, eh? Six soldiers and me. And they were all down in the garage, playing High Six. Technicians not invited. So I was locked in when the cloud went up. And they were locked out.”

He was quiet for a moment, staring impassively into space, and then he said, “There were cameras down there. There’s cameras everywhere. And I could see them banging on the door trying to get back in, but I couldn’t override the system. I did try. Eventually. When the cloud was coming. But I couldn’t. The cloud hit and they…I shut off the monitor, so I’m not sure exactly what happened. I know there was one of them left alive, because I’d turn on the monitor sometimes and see him still…on them. But he wandered off eventually. I don’t know where. Maybe out to the base housing, eh? Maybe he was the one who found Ylati…and Bsaia…and the boys. I suppose it doesn’t matter, really. Saiakr had a full shift on at his base, though. All their people were safely locked in just like they should have been. One hundred and fifteen people, he said.

“But the word came down, like the word always does. The viruses were incinerated. Then the scientists were killed. Then the officers were told to kill the low-ranking soldiers, so they did, and I guess the commanding officer took out the officers. Saiakr was a technician, I don’t remember if I told you. Our job is to crawl around inside tiny tubes and under machines and behind panels. Nobody knows how to hide like we do. He worked his way up through the air system until he was in the floor under the commander’s office. That’s where he was when the base commander came back and shot himself. One hundred and fifteen people were saved from the cloud. One hundred and fourteen of them killed each other anyway. Because those were their orders. He told me that,” said the man, rubbing at his brows, “and what can I say? We called the stuff God’s Wrath, did I tell you? We called the stuff God’s Wrath…and maybe it was.”

He shut the camera off. The monitor flickered while Meoraq leaned on the door and took deep breaths and then the picture came back. The man was there, fully dressed, haggard, with a device in his hand that could only be a gun.

“I can’t believe I’m down here again,” he said and looked at the gun. “So. Fuck it. It’s day one-eighty-eight. Saiakr isn’t coming. No one is. I’ve been transmitting non-stop over every channel every day, but no one comes. I’ve got enough nutrition water to last a hundred people a hundred years, but there’s just me…and I’m tired. So.” He hefted the gun briefly. “So this is it. I just wanted to say, just in case there’s someone out there after all, that I’m sorry. If you find me…fuck, I don’t know. Burn me, I guess. I shouldn’t be infected, but burn me anyway. Just in case. I’ll understand if you want to piss on me first.”

He lifted his head and looked directly at the camera. “My name is Nuu Sukaga and I helped to kill the world.” He raised the gun and fired. The shot was silent, producing nothing but a pulse of light that briefly rippled across his scales. The sound of his skull bursting open and his brains hitting the back of the chair behind him was wet and loud. The body slumped over and out of frame. The camera kept recording.

Meoraq watched for a short time, then pushed himself slowly off the door. He walked out into the room and looked behind the desk.

“Is he there?” Amber asked uneasily.

“No.”

“Are you…Are you all right?”

He glanced at her, then at the monitor. “Apparently not. You understood more of that, I think, than I did. And you were not surprised.” He turned around to face her. “How long have you known?”

“I…”

“Since the niyowah in the ruins, the night of the storm,” he mused, looking away. “I think you tried to tell me. You had a word for it. I remember that.”

“Meoraq—”

“Tell me the word. I can’t say it. I want to hear it again.”

She felt her shoulders falling without ever realizing how tensely she’d been holding them. “Biological warfare,” she said softly.

“This means fighting? With…blooms?”

“With disease,” she said.

He looked at her, then at the monitor again. A cleanerbot had come silently into the room. She could just see the top of its rounded head as it hovered beside the chair, moving minutely back and forth as, presumably, it cleaned the corpse. “You built them?” he asked. “Like machines? You could actually make…madness? And hurl it, like a spear?”

The monitor went abruptly black. He looked at it, frowning, as a new image snapped on. The same room, now with several lizardmen standing around the desk. The nearest of them stepped back, his head cocked at a critical angle, and said, “There it is.”

“Is it working?”

“Says it is.” The man’s spines flared forward and snapped back in a terse shrug. “The only way to check is to turn it off.”

“Check.”

“Mkole!” one of the others groaned, but the first man, although plainly irritated, stepped forward again and the screen went briefly black.

“God, that’s awful,” said Amber, watching. “How long…I mean…Do you think that’s Saiakr?”

Meoraq grunted one of his I-don’t-know grunts, frowning.

The image came back in the middle of Mkole’s waspish, “—only to find out it was never recording!”

“Leave him alone, Brunt,” said the first man, his spines now completely flat. “Let’s just do this. My name is Oyan Ichazul.”

Meoraq startled. After a moment, Amber realized the name was familiar to her as well. Oracle Oyan was one of the Six. It could be a coincidence—who knew how many Bierces there were back on Earth?—but no sooner had this thought ventured itself into her brain than the others added themselves to the roster.

“My name is Uyane Xaima.”

“I am Surgeon Thaliszr Mkole.”

“Shev. Mykrm Shevas.”

“I was Amagar Silq. They call me the Brunt now.”

“And I am Lashraq Zhan,” finished Zhan. “It is now 3046, what some people are calling Year Seventeen after the Fall. Sometime in the spring, I think.”

Shev snorted. “Not that anyone can tell. The U’uskirs dropped their whole fucking array when they got hit by the cloud. They didn’t even aim the fucking thing, just fired whatever they had at whatever it all happened to be pointed at. Over seven thousand disruptors going off at once. Irradiated the whole fucking planet, and you can’t hear it from in here, but the storm it kicked up when it happened is still going on. I haven’t seen the sun once in seventeen years.”

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing the casualties for some time,” Mkole added anxiously, “but we seem to have stabilized for now. Death by direct exposure to radiation seems to have receded to nominal levels and the risk of related complications appears to be dropping as well. Along the eastern seaboard of Tirazez, anyway.”

“Ah fuck me, here we go,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at his brow-ridges. “Zhan, shut him down or tie me up. I can’t listen to this again.”

“Breathe, Xaima. Breathe and let him talk. This is part of why we came here.”

“What is this?” Meoraq asked. His spines were flat, his eyes wide, betraying a terrible tension and fear that had not been present even during Technician Nuu’s short series of narratives. “Who are these people? What are they saying?”

She put her hand on his arm and he looked at her wildly. “It’s all right, Meoraq.”

“Those are not priests!”

“Just listen.”

Mkole concluded his rather rambling summary of the post-apocalyptic health hazards he’d seen with the optimistic note that, “We’ve estimated that life expectancy has risen almost six months in the past seven years and although female fertility remains dangerously low, from all reports, one out of every thirty pregnancies is now being carried to term with no marked increase in infant defect or mortality.”

“That’s enough.”

“But this could be important!” Mkole protested, looking wounded. “Statistics like these are absolutely vital in the process of—”

“Enough for now then,” said Zhan, but gently. “Just for now. Thank you, surgeon.”

“We need to make records,” Mkole insisted, retreating with the help of the burly Brunt to sit in the chair where Nuu had blown his brains out. He wiped at his eyes. “It’s important! We have to tell them about…about how it all ended!”

“It’s not over yet,” the Brunt rumbled, patting him, and Xaima, scowling at them with his arms folded and looking so much like Meoraq that Amber had to check and see that it wasn’t just his reflection in the video screen, flicked his spines and muttered, “It may as well be.”

“No! Listen! We have seen…” Mkole’s words faltered. For a moment, he merely stared at the camera, his eyes flicking back and forth like an actor reading his next troubling lines. It took Lashraq’s hand on his shoulder before he seemed to pull himself out of it, first with a shaky breath and then the continuation of his even, almost unemotional recital. “We have seen what is unquestionably only the beginning of a devastating wave of extinctions. You…You simply can’t imagine how quickly it happens. The collapse is…”

Mkole lapsed again into blank-faced silence.

“We still have some livestock in the middle districts,” Lashraq said, frowning. “Mostly ilqi. But I don’t think they’ll last much longer.”

“It turns out that cattle need feed,” Shev pointed out wryly. “And feed needs to be planted, grown, harvested and processed.”

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with feeding them,” said the Brunt, looking very mildly surprised. “Ilqi, tuk-tuks, woolyvibs, and every other kind of cattle we keep, I promise you, even the so-called natural-grown ones—most of them are surgically altered to keep them from fucking and the rest probably couldn’t figure out how.”

“All the animals are dying,” Ichazul said suddenly. “Wild and domestic. It’s not the Wrath and it can’t all be the weather—”

“The weather’s part of it,” Lashraq muttered, glancing up as if he could see through the roof to the storm howling behind it.

“Of course, it’s part of it!” Ichazul snapped. “There’s no direct sunlight anymore, the fucking rain never stops until it freezes, and the ice storms never stop until they turn back into rain! But it’s only part of it. The real problem is the plants. Nothing grows like it used to. There’s something, some kind of chemical wash in the rain or maybe a parasite or a virus, but whatever it is, it’s killing everything.”

“Untrue,” the Brunt said. “Thorns and rockweed are growing. They’ll grow right up your boots if you stand still.”

Ichazul rolled his eyes and gave his spines an irritable flick. “Fine, it’s killing all the crops. By which I mean the stuff we need to eat.”

“By which you mean,” the Brunt corrected, smiling, “the stuff we’ve made dependent upon us. Think about it. Artificial pollination, climate control, nutrient-enriched soil…koitaan and pialhfruit were never meant to grow in Gedai. Are you really surprised it’s all dying? Everything that was already in the ground grew wild after the Wrath fell,” he added, looking directly into the computer’s camera. “But it takes men to grow crops these days and all the men were busy killing each other. So it all died.”

“I have tried on six separate occasions to grow riak,” Ichazul countered. Faint lines of color were becoming visible along his throat. “Riak! And I know what I’m doing, damn it! I’m telling you, it’s more than that! There’s something wrong, something in the soil or the rain or…something!”

“Who knows what we shot at each other?” Xaima asked, showing very little concern. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t both be right. It wouldn’t take much of a contaminant to kill off a grove of koitaan in Gedai, or for animals to eat all the crops and seed that were left. Because for a while there were animals everywhere. Not just the vermin, like you’d think, but everything. All the people were dead and the animals simply exploded to fill all that empty space. We were hip-deep in ponucs that first year and then they all dropped dead and the uzayas and ebii were everywhere until they dropped dead. You’d think all our pet apas would just go feral and be all right, but they were all gone by the third year.” He stopped there, his spines slowly lowering, and finally said, “I still can’t really believe that. I’ve had an apa underfoot all my life. But they’re gone. Everywhere. They just…”

“Collapsed,” said Mkole.

“And he’s right, it’s probably just the beginning,” Lashraq agreed quietly. “I don’t know if anything will be left at the end, but there’s always hope. We still have some ilqis and if we can take care of them, they’ll make it. There will always be yifu, I suppose, and the ghets seem to be doing all right.”

“Naturally,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at the side of his snout. “All the apas are dead, but we have ghets.”

“They’re little and furry. Maybe we can make pets out of them instead,” suggested the Brunt. “You’ve still got your apa’s collar, don’t you?”

“Fuck a fist,” Xaima snapped.

The Brunt’s spines flared lazily forward. “Is that an offer?”

“So we’ve lost most of our domestic animals and about half the native wildlife,” said Lashraq as his men visibly defused themselves, edging away from one another and taking slow breaths. “But several conservation parks seemed to have opened their doors in the first days of God’s Wrath and while most of the animals have died off, some of them actually seem to be thriving.”

“There are saoqs all over central Yroq,” Shev inserted with a laugh. “I mean it. They’re everywhere.”

“And corrokis,” grunted the Brunt. “Wild corrokis. In herds.”

“Right. The apas die. The woolyvibs die. The oshe? I haven’t seen even a track in the mud in more than ten years.” Shev leaned forward into the camera’s eye, spreading his arms and flaring his spines fully forward to make himself as impressively sincere as possible. “But there are corrokis all over Yroq. Chew on that for a while. Right this moment, there are probably five, six corrokis eating the shrubs off the Prime Chancellor’s lawn.”

“They’ll die out,” said Lashraq with finality, proving that whatever else he might be, he was no prophet. “Nothing that size could possibly survive now, but other animals might. And as long as we have something to feed on and something else to clean up after us, we have some hope of restoring and maintaining a natural balance.”

“Natural,” snorted the Brunt.

“I believe the world will survive. In our arrogance, we may have thought we could destroy it, but the world is more resilient than any weapon our mortal minds could dream up. All we can do is kill each other,” Lashraq said.

“But we are damned good at that,” agreed the Brunt, striking his chest with feigned pride. Shev and Ichazul laughed.

Zhan stared at his boots until they quieted. At last, he raised his hand and indicated the group as a whole. “Hard to believe this started out as a supply raid.”

Meoraq started again. “Raid?”

“I’m from Daophith, originally. After the cloud hit, somehow a fire got started and the whole city burned to the ground, along with Jezaana and Zethoze and half the northern states. Best thing, really. The cities were no good after the Fall, nothing but killing grounds for God’s Wrath. I ended up outside Ynanje with Shev and Ichi here, living in an old waystation. By the time the cold season came along, we were all six together and Shev made two fairly sky-shaking observations. The first was that God Himself couldn’t have arranged a better group to survive the annihilation of all life as we know it: soldier, mechanic, surgeon, historian, technician and botanist. The second was that we had no women.”

“And you all were starting to look pretty damn good to me,” Xaima remarked.

“So with the lofty goal in mind of acquiring, in no particular order, food, water, supplies and sex,” said Zhan archly, “we set out from our cozy waystation to see what was left of the world. Somehow, that turned into a two-year trek across the fucking country, stopping in at every house with a lit window along the way.”

“Got dipped once in a while, didn’t we?” Shev grunted.

Zhan acknowledged this with a shrug of his spines. “So. The Brunt back there pointed out that we were probably the first people to really get a good look at the world beyond the one little piece we inhabited after the Fall and we had what he called a divinely-ordained obligation to record our findings.”

“Fuck you, O noble leader,” said the Brunt, amused.

“Records are important,” Mkole whispered, and the Brunt patted his shoulder.

“Records are important,” Zhan agreed, his spines lowering. “Because when we sat down to really talk about it, we realized we’d actually learned something pretty damn amazing. I think it was…I think it was you who noticed.”

“In Reqann, yes.” Xaima stepped up as Zhan moved back, eyeing the camera with an expression of rueful humor and contempt. “By that time, we’d been to a few of these military outposts and finally found out just what the fuck had happened. Most of them had some kind of survivor’s journal left for us to find, like the one this poor pisser made, but with the exception of that crazy woman with all the dolls, they were dead. We couldn’t ask any questions and if we didn’t have Ichi along, we could never have run the damn videos in the first place.”

“Almost every one of them were technicians,” Ichazul remarked, “and not one thought to put their video on automatic playback. Sure, the recording will last until the end of Time or until their roof caves in, but in fifty years, everyone who knows which buttons to push is going to be dead.”

“So here we are,” said Zhan and snorted. “And I don’t know how happy you’re going to be when you hear what we have to say, but if you’re standing there to hear it at all, then our plan probably worked. Just remember that.” He glanced at the other men, grunted to himself, and looked back at the camera. “If we did our job right, you may have heard that we came here to meet with Great Sheul and that we heard His words and wrote His laws,” he said. “But honestly…we’re going to make it all up.”

 

* * *

 

Amber and Meoraq listened. There were plenty of words she didn’t know, but she was able to work most of them out by context; there must have been just as many words he didn’t know, and set down in ways just as foreign to him, but Meoraq asked no questions. Her awareness of him faded as the men on the screen talked about the virus Nuu had called God’s Wrath with the kind of clinical callousness that came so easily to survivors. They didn’t pace, rarely gestured, and had a habit of looking right at the camera even when they weren’t talking so that it began to feel uneasily like they were alive—that they were here in this room, in this very moment—so much so that Amber found herself nodding now and then to show them she was listening.

Beside her, Meoraq remained motionless. He listened and did not react at all.

“The virus had absolute communicability in its first stage, the cloud stage,” Xaima said, gesturing vaguely towards the consoles surrounding them. “And if Ichi really knows how to read these machines and isn’t just lying us along for the dips and the good times—”

“Oh fuck me, my secret is out,” said Ichazul dryly.

“—then it’s still at ninety-six, seventeen fucking years after the Fall. The shit is in everything now. The air, the ground, the water…everything. So I guess it’s safe to assume that everyone has it. Why isn’t everyone dead?” He paused. “I have it. I woke up alone in the streets of South Thuure covered in blood. Caked in it. And I don’t know what I’d been fucking, but I’d scraped half the scales off my dick doing it and what was left was also caked in blood. I found a—” He stopped himself there, rubbing restlessly at his throat, which was still safely black. At last, he tipped his head slightly and went on.

“So. God’s Wrath is finite. Eventually, no matter how deep in you are, you run out of things to kill and things to fuck. You calm down. Of course, you’re ready to rage again the instant Mkole starts talking or, hell, even if you get a little too deep into a nice, tight woman, but if you feel it coming on, you can sometimes get clear of it. It’s not like being crazy, at least not all the time. You’re aware when you start to burn. You can stop it if you try. The problem is what the problem’s been with us dumaqs all along: Trying is hard and we don’t want to do it.”

“Burning is easy,” added Shev. “Especially when we can all tell each other that it’s the virus and how impossible it is to stop once you’ve let go. We’re not in control. It’s all the virus.”

“But there is a scale,” Ichazul put in. “Some of us let go slow and come out of it fairly quick. And some of us go completely fucking out of their scaly skin and stay there for days. So far, we haven’t found anyone who’s actually immune, but there’s obviously some kind of resistance. And since we’re starting to see the first generation after the Fall coming into their maturity, it seems like it might be genetic.”

“Right,” said Xaima, flaring his spines with irritation, although the interruption itself hadn’t appeared to have bothered him. “Now I’m going to talk about a place called Nishi, which used to be some holy site two or three thousand years ago—I guess it still was—but for the most part, it was a city like pretty much every other city except for the eastern edge of town, which was occupied by the Sheulists.”

Amber glanced at Meoraq. He seemed calm enough, but only if one didn’t look at his eyes.

“When the cloud hit Nishi, it went down exactly like every other city we’ve visited…except along the eastern edge. There were over a thousand people living there after the Fall, and just in case you don’t understand how significant that is, I don’t think we’ve come across a thousand more people anywhere else in the world, even if we lumped them all together. When we first found them, we didn’t know what to think except that maybe they were somehow immune or maybe they’d all been underground or maybe they’d been transmitting their location to survivors and most of them were refugees, but no. The only difference between eastern Nishi and the rest of the world was the Sheulists, and the biggest thing about the Sheulists is not just that they believe in their god, but they believe that their god is in control. These people work, and I mean work, for hours every day, systematically reinforcing the idea that nothing a man does has any lasting effect and any perception to the contrary is only part of God’s plan.”

“We’re not in control,” said Shev, in exactly the same tone he’d used before and with only the slightest arch twist to his expression. “It’s all God’s will.”

“That shit is maddening,” Xaima commented, glancing that way. “I had to be tied down for eight days because of the rage those fools put in me with that.”

“I didn’t handle it too well at first either,” Shev admitted. “But it was hard to ignore a thousand people in one place where everywhere else, you couldn’t count fifty. I’m sure Mkole can fill up a few hours talking about the altered mind states of meditation or how it suppresses this chemical or excites that gland or what the fuck ever it does. It worked, that’s the important thing.”

“Right up until their high priest decided they should all go to Sheul’s Halls together,” Ichazul said with a snort. “Crazy fucking zealots drank deathweed. Brewed it up with honey, lined up and drank it. Like they were drinking tea.”

“Yes, but they were calm when they did it,” said the Brunt. “And when we moved on from there to Maiaq, Zhan told the leader of those refugees that if he gave himself to Sheul, the Wrath couldn’t take him. Maybe it helped that none of them had ever been a Sheulist themselves or knew much more than whatever you pick up listening to some idiot pray up a transport dock. Zhan told them—correct me if I exaggerate, noble leader—the most outrageous packet of lies ever emitted by the mouth of a man.”

Zhan didn’t correct him. He just stood there, arms folded, brooding on his boots.

“And they bought it,” Xaima said, flinging out his arms. “They bought every fucking word. In a single day, this man reinvented both a caste system and a working model of a fucking theocracy and hammered them together, and by the very next morning, forty-two people were out in the fucking rain, praying. These were people who would have laughed at the very idea of god-worship just seventeen short years ago.”

“Gets harder to laugh at the idea of a vengeful god after the world comes to a burning end,” Zhan remarked.

“I guess.” Xaima gave his head a shake. “We spent the whole cold season there, the six of us wedged in with forty-two other people in a warehouse no bigger than this room, and no one died. He had them praying every morning, meditating every night, and preaching Sheul’s grace and Sheul’s justice and Sheul’s hammer and Sheul’s fires farting out Sheul’s ass until we almost had to tie Ichi up again.”

Ichazul snorted. “No crying. I was that close.”

“But no one let go. Not one of them raged. So suddenly, he’s Prophet Lashraq and we’re his holy oracles. And we’re not chasing after slit and free food any more, we’re preaching about Sheul’s burning hand and the caste of the Hammer or the Sword and the sacred number of creation.”

“And being handed slit and free food,” said Shev.

“Never got so much dipping in my life as I did after I turned holy,” added the Brunt in a reflective manner.

Still nothing from Meoraq.

“And it seems to work everywhere we go,” Xaima went on, “but what good does that do, really? The cloud will be around a hundred years at least. The virus will be in everyone’s fucking blood. We’ll all be dead, but the rage goes on, and already we’re finding people pretending to be priests of Sheul and adding their lies to our lies for their own unscrupulous purposes.”

“Like chasing slit and getting free food,” said the Brunt.

“So Zhan says we need a holy writ, something people can read, something that will last,” Xaima concluded. “We found a printing shop in what’s left of Pholcha and Ichi says he can get it running and bind us up some books. All we have to do is come up with some sufficiently holy-sounding way to keep people from letting go to rage. Zhan studied this piss for who knows how many years, so we’ll let him do all the wording, but for posterity’s sake, here’s what we’ve come up with so far. First, limit the fucking.”

“No,” said Zhan quietly. “First, Sheul’s word alone is law. There are no other gods and no men with authority to alter or interpret his word. His law is absolute as written. There is no other truth.”

“Whatever,” said Xaima, rolling his eyes. “Second is to limit the fucking. God’s Wrath doesn’t just make a man mad. It hits him in the part of his brain where all us civilized dumaqs keep our most basic impulses.”

Mkole raised his head, blinking as if he’d heard his name. “It attacks the hypothalamus, primarily, and through it, the adrenal system. Females have been, ah, depressed and males, stimulated. Rage is essentially an overdose of male sexual hormones, ah, which dominate our aggressive response and…and…hyper-sensitivity to female pheromones.”

“That’s what I said,” Xaima snapped, looking annoyed. “If he gets a whiff of a woman, he’ll fuck her. If he gets caught up fucking, he’ll eventually go into rage. The longer he’s in rage, the more he’ll want to fuck, and while his brain is burning up, he’s killing and fucking everything that moves. So lock up the women and limit the fucking.”

“Be very careful when you write that one up,” Shev added. “You’ll have them castrating themselves or killing their daughters.”

“Right. Sex is fine—”

“Sex is great,” said the Brunt, with feeling.

“But limit it. We’ve been saying no more than twice a dip—”

“Because three is the sacred number of creation,” agreed Shev and threw Zhan a grimace of admiration. “I honestly don’t know where he comes up with this stuff.”

“—because two seems to get a man past that first desperate stage, even if he hasn’t had a righteous poke in a year, but two doesn’t wear him down so much that the burn just takes over. But the challenge is going to be limiting the killing. If we did this right, you probably don’t have any idea what kind of killing is going on out here,” Xaima said in a low, suddenly somber tone. “You’d think, in a world where so many people have died so senselessly, that we would do anything to preserve another dumaq life, but let me tell you, it is not so. We are killing each other over water, food, medicine, women, blankets, shelters, books, boots, who won the fucking Cenuqa tournament in 3013, whether or not corrokis can look up—”

“They can not,” Shev interrupted, sending a black glare at the Brunt, who calmly replied, “Of course they can, they just choose not to.”

“Anything and everything,” Xaima concluded with a sigh, rubbing at his throat again. “Not because we’re sick, not because of the virus, but just…because. And we’re doing it more than ever before, because now there’s no one around to tell us not to.”

“Yet,” said Zhan.

“I don’t know how the hell he thinks he’s going to scare us so bad we stop fighting overnight, but if I have the broad strokes right, it comes down to three things: Take away the knives. If they don’t see or smell blood, apparently, they won’t think about it. Like there aren’t a hundred other ways to kill a man, Zhan.”

“Have to start somewhere.”

“Here’s an idea, start with the fucking guns!”

“I will. That kind of technology will be part of Gann’s corruption. We’ll make it a sin to work machines.”

“The piss you say!”

“You can’t mean it, Zhan. What are we supposed to do, live in caves and wear animal skins?”

“Who’s Gann?”

“We’ll destroy whatever we can, of course, but all we really have to do is convince them that the cities carry Gann’s taint and can corrupt anyone who enters.”

“But why?”

“Because they can,” Zhan said quietly. “They did.”

“That is shit and you know it,” spat Xaima. “Zhan, there have to be a thousand people, good people, trying to make lives in those cities, trying to build them up again and make them safe. They’re not going to leave just because you offer them a god! You give this ridiculous fucking cult of yours ten years and your Sheulists will kill those people for no reason! For God!”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care!”

“I can’t, Xaima. I have to care about what else they were making when they dropped God’s Wrath and who might be looking for it. There may be a thousand good people in those cities, but there have to be ten thousand weapons and they’re all just lying around. There’s no way we can pick everything up ourselves. We have to make them all want to just…not look.”

“What are we supposed to do without cities?” Shev demanded.

“Build new ones.” Zhan looked up as a faint rumble heralded a particularly vicious peal of thunder in whatever storm beat on their walls in the past. “Stronger ones. The old cities aren’t safe anyway. Not anymore. Even this place will fall down if we don’t protect it.”

“Right, so let me see if I have your plan. We herd everyone out of their shelters, tell them technology is bad and give them a pointed stick and a fucking spoon to build a new home with, and then we take the most violent people we can find, the ones with the absolute least resistance to the virus, and, instead of just killing them—”

“We can’t just kill them, Xaima,” Zhan said patiently. “If we turn it into a fight, they’ll win it. They’ll rage first, they’ll rage longer, and they’ll rip us apart.”

“Whatever. We tell them the reason they’re so violent is because God has blessed them, have I got that right?”

“Yes.”

“We make them members of the highest caste instead. We give them the knives no one else gets to play with and we tell them they’re holy warriors instead of the psychotic murder machines they really are.”

Amber looked at Meoraq again. His spines were flat and shivering slightly against his skull, but other than that, he looked only very mildly interested.

“When they believe it, they’ll pray,” said Zhan. “When they pray, they’ll calm down.”

“We give them all the women they want—”

“Provided they respect the sacred number of creation—”

“He said it with a straight face,” murmured the Brunt.

“—and raise any children they make as members of their caste.”

“What the hell good does that do?” Xaima burst out. The patches along his throat began to pale ominously. “Why the fuck would you go out of your way to find the worst fucking strain of the virus and breed more carriers?”

“Calm down, Xaima.”

“It makes no sense!”

“Xaima. Breathe.”

Xaima clapped both hands to his snout and bent himself in half, choking in air and hissing it out while the others watched warily. Gradually, very gradually, his scales faded back to black.

“The idea,” said Zhan, “is not to breed carriers, but to isolate them. We start them praying as soon as they can talk and keep them at it all their lives. We let them fight each other away from the public eye and we make them kill each other when they do. We give them women so they don’t have an excuse to riot through people’s homes and take them. We take the children away and start them praying and on it goes. If we do this long enough, with any luck, we’ll breed whatever quality it is that makes some of us so predisposed to the virus into the smallest percent of the population, which will then kill itself off.”

“Never work,” said Shev.

“Probably not, or at least not for a long time. But it will keep them under control. Look,” said Zhan, his own scales lightening although his tone never changed, “if you throw a man in a cage, he will spend the rest of his life fighting to escape. But if you tell him no one else in the world gets the cage but him, dress it up and throw in a few pillows, then he’ll walk in on his own.”

One breath. That was all Meoraq did. Just took one breath a little harder than the rest. Amber took his hand impulsively. He looked at it, then at her, and then up at the screen again, all without expression.

“What a shining flood of ghet-shit!” Xaima was exclaiming.

“They’ll believe me,” said Zhan, not looking up from his boots. His scales were already returning to their normal color. “They want desperately to believe in something, anything, and there is nothing else left. Yes, it’s a lie. But the lie will be glorious. If it’s the one lamp left burning in the whole world…everyone will come to see it.”

The doors clicked. The androgynous lizardly voice informed them that the timeout had ended, the locks were released.

Meoraq turned around.

Amber started after him, but he stopped her with the cut of one upraised hand.

“Stay,” he said in a hoarse voice that strove for calm. “Stay and hear them. I need to…I need to think.”

He walked away. Amber watched the doors groan open and shut as Zhan kept talking, outlining the principles of a gospel Meoraq could probably recite in its polished form from the first invocation to the final amen. His glorious lie.

 

10

 

It couldn’t have been much more than an hour before the recording finally finished, but if someone had told her that it had been three hours or even six, Amber would have believed it. She felt older, right down to her bones.

She didn’t want to move, but she didn’t linger. The lights were already fading, the room powering down, and she did not want to be trapped in here when the doors died. Human voices weren’t the same as a dumaq’s. She wasn’t at all sure ‘Nuu Sukaga was going to work for her.

But the lockplate took her tap and the doors hissed open and there was Meoraq, sitting just outside, his knees drawn up and his chin resting on his arms, staring at the mark of the Prophet on the wall. He’d lit some of the candles. He’d stomped on a few too, but at the moment, he was just sitting there.

“Hey,” she said.

He did not reply, not even to look at her.

“Do you want to hear any of it?” she asked, because she felt she’d ought to offer, even though she knew damned well he didn’t.

No response.

She went over and stood next to him, fidgeting unhappily with the front of her tunic. She felt awful, too awful to cry, too awful to even throw up. She touched his shoulder—it was stone wrapped in leather—and then petted at the top of his head. His flat spines flicked hard, throwing off her hand. She took it back and kept it to herself, clutching at her girdle. “Please talk to me,” she said.

Silence.

“Can I talk to you?”

His faceless stare wavered and finally shifted up at her. He still didn’t answer, not even to grunt, but he watched as she moved around and sat down in front of him.

“There’s this saying I used to hear a lot,” said Amber. “It goes, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ I used to think it was total horseshit, to tell you the truth. I mean, intentions matter, so if someone tries to do something good, I mean really tries, that ought to count for something.”

Meoraq remained immobile, silent.

“I can only imagine what you’re feeling,” she said. “And I don’t think I can imagine it very well. But…he had good intentions, Meoraq. People were killing each other. The last people on the whole planet, the very last ones, were still killing each other. He stopped it the only way he knew how.”

“He lied.”

The words were wounds in Meoraq’s throat. She could hear them bleeding.

“Why?” he asked suddenly. “Why did he have to leave a message? Why couldn’t he just do it and let us have the lie if we needed it so much?”

“Maybe because…he wanted to believe you wouldn’t always need it. He was a teacher once. He knew the value of preserving the past for the future. And he—Listen to me, Meoraq!” She caught his arm and refused to be shaken off. “He thought he was doing the right thing. And maybe he was. If people could change on their own, don’t you think they would have in the seventeen years before this guy Lashraq came to Xi’Matezh?”

“Don’t call it that,” Meoraq said harshly. “This is no shrine.”

“Yes, it is. It may not be the one you thought it was, but it is a shrine. When it would have been so easy to make sure no one ever heard any of that, Lashraq wanted it heard. He wanted people to know what he did and why he did it. Meoraq—” Amber moved her hand from his shoulder to touch the heaving plates over his heart. “He wanted people to know the truth.”

“Truth? What is the truth, eh? Yesterday, I was the Sword in His hand! Today, I am sick! Today, God’s hand on my heart is a poison in my fucking brain! Today, I have murdered hundreds of people!” He slapped a hand hard over his snout and shut his eyes, taking several deep breaths before he spoke again. “Stop trying to comfort me. I have been well-trained by their lies. A Sheulek is always calm.”

“You told me once that truth isn’t always just what someone says,” said Amber after a moment. “But what something is. What it means.”

“This place means nothing. Sheul’s Word means nothing.”

“So God didn’t open up the door and shake their hands and say things out loud while Lashraq wrote it all down, but so what? When God talks to you, do you hear it with your ears? It’s…hard to believe in God, but if there is one, I can believe He brought them here. I saw that whole tape and I can believe it because I believe it was the only thing that could have helped your people save themselves and maybe God knew it too.”

“There is no God!” hissed Meoraq. The stripes along his throat brightened visibly in surges, throbbing with his pulse. “There’s nothing here! He lied! They all lied and I can live with that, but right now, damn it, just shut up! There is no God and you knew it all along, so just let me be!”

She did, but she kept looking at him, watching the yellow bloom and die on his scales, and eventually, he looked back at her. “Can I tell you something?” she asked quietly. “Something I really have known all along. Something that is one hundred percent true. Something…Something I could have built my own shrine on.”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t say no.

“You’re an alien,” she told him. “Or I am. One of us is, at any rate.”

He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges.

“Our worlds are billions of miles apart. We come from two entirely different evolutionary trees. You have scales, I have hair. We have different skeletons, different organs, different everything, right down to the number of fingers and toes. We are one hundred percent incompatible. The only thing we have in common is a carbon base.”

“So?” he said wearily.

“So I’m pregnant,” said Amber, and was amazed at how matter-of-fact she sounded, saying it for the first time. “What the hell do you call that if it isn’t God?”

He raised his head from his hand and stared at her.

“You told me once that I was good at seeing evidence and, boy, did it piss me off because this is something that I really did not want to see. But men can only push themselves so far, Meoraq, and men with faith can only push so much further. All the evidence is telling me…there’s something else out there, pulling from the other side. I don’t like it,” said Amber bluntly. “I’m not at peace with it. I sure as hell don’t take comfort in it…but I’m glad you do.”

He frowned, tried to look away, but Amber caught his snout and turned him back.

“Because all the things God isn’t for me,” she said, “you are. Because of you, I see Him every day. So start talking, lizardman, but I warn you, you’ve got a hard talk ahead of you if you’re going to convince me there’s no God after He gave you to me.”

She waited, but he didn’t say anything. He took a few deep breaths, then reached up and brushed the back of his hand along her cheek. His eyes closed. He bent and let her guide his head to rest on her shoulder. He put his arms around her. He did not rage.

He wept.

 

* * *

 

He cried off and on for a long time. Even after he was done, he held on to her, so heavy and so quiet that she thought he’d fallen asleep. Amber stroked his back and stared into space and after an eternity of this, was startled when he thickly said, “What are you thinking?”

“Huh?”

He lifted his head off her shoulder and shifted around until he was sitting at her side, facing the same blank stretch of wall. “You were very quiet.”

“So were you.”

“But I know my thoughts. What were yours?”

“I was thinking of the day my mother died,” Amber admitted. “Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably. “I should have been thinking about you or something. You know. So you could ask me what I was thinking while you were at the lowest point of your life and I could say, ‘How much I love you,’ and you’d feel better.”

He smiled faintly. “I feel better.”

“Because I was thinking of my mother?” she asked, surprised.

“Because you told me the truth, even when you thought it was something I did not want to hear. That is how I know how much you love me. I do not need to be told.” He brushed the back of his knuckles across her brow, then dropped his hand to his lap again and stared at the wall. “What happened the day your mother died?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“You always sound so certain about the things I want.”

“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Nothing happened, really. I mean, we were there, but they didn’t let us in to see her. We were just sitting in the room outside, me and Nicci, and I was holding her kind of like this. Waiting for the world to end.”

He grunted.

“But it didn’t. End, I mean. Life went on.” She heard herself utter a surprisingly sincere little laugh without knowing she was going to. “Look how far it went on.”

He said nothing.

“What were you thinking?” she asked.

“That I’m glad you’re here with me.” He said it without emotion, without looking at her. “Master Tsazr had to hear that message and walk all the way back to Xeqor alone. I couldn’t do that.”

“He probably thought that too, until he did it.”

“I couldn’t,” he insisted. “My life ended when I heard those words. I may have looked and sounded like a living man, but I was clay, soulless clay…until you spoke to me again. One word changes all the others. Truth.” He shut his eyes and rubbed his brow-ridges. “I am so thankful that you are here…and I have no one to thank.”

Amber held him while the silence grew heavier and heavier, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, even knowing she couldn’t make it any better, she said, “What are you afraid of the most?”

He was quiet. Neck bent, he opened and closed his mouth several times before finally whispering, “Being alone.”

She put her arm around him again.

“I know I should be more worried about my soul,” he said in a quick, almost embarrassed way. “But I think I have one and I don’t think I’ll care if I’m wrong when I’m dead. What frightens me is knowing I’m alone now. When it matters.”

She nodded, gently rubbing at his bicep, right above his sabk, and feeling his scales scrape at her palm. “I know that nothing I say is going to fix what you’re feeling right now, but listen to me, Meoraq, please. If there is no God, then you’ve been making all the decisions up until now and you’ve done just fine.”

He made a sound of lackluster agreement, not looking at her.

“And if there is a God, He’ll be there, the way He’s always been there,” said Amber. She hesitated and then softly said, “If there is a God, He’s with you now.”

Meoraq flinched a little. He looked up, searching the sooty ceiling as his spines slowly came all the way forward. He wiped at his eyes, glanced at his damp fingers, and stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked, following him to the door.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But at least I have the comfort of knowing nothing worse can possibly happen.”

And with that, he pushed open the heavy door and stepped out into a pool of blood. He looked down; the hilt of a kzung came whistling down and cracked against the top of his head. Hands seized her, pulling her roughly out into the light over Meoraq’s crumpling body, and the first thing she saw—perhaps not unsurprisingly—was neither the raiders nor their captive nor even the dead man at their feet, but Nicci in their leader’s grip.

Amber let out a cry and lunged, but all this accomplished was to catch the leader’s eye. He looked at her, cocked his head, looked more closely at Nicci, and then tossed her carelessly aside for one of his men to catch. He smiled.

“Hello, Eshiqi,” said Iziz.

 

11

 

Nicci didn’t cry. She didn’t fight, either. She only stood in the bruising grip of the raider who held her, looking back at Amber with their mother’s eyes. There was as much of Bo Peep’s aimless, haggard accusation in that silent stare as there was pain, but there was no confusion. She didn’t ask who these men were or what they wanted. She didn’t ask Amber to make them go away. She just stood there.

“It’ll be all right, Nicci,” Amber told her, just as if she weren’t also in the unbreakable grip of a lizardman, just as if Meoraq weren’t lying on the ground being tied up while he was still unconscious. Just as if there were some chance it might be true.

“It will not be all right, Nicci!” Iziz snapped. He did not falter over her name and why should he? He had been born into Gann’s world. Creation was not sacred to him; nothing was. “No matter what happens, it will not go well for you!”

Nicci did not shiver, did not even look at him. She turned her face away from Amber and watched the waves roll in from the sea.

Iziz spared this emotionless response a glance, but no more than that. Whatever he was looking for, he wanted it from Amber. “You look good, Eshiqi,” he said, with surprising mildness following the venom of his other words. “I mean that. I didn’t think you would. You are so fucking ugly and I hate you so fucking much, I am truly astonished by how glad I am to see you. So often, the things you look forward to the most are just sparks, eh? A flash, a little heat, and nothing but ash for the rest of your life. But you look good. Come here. Let her go,” he said to the raider holding her. “She won’t run. Come here, Eshiqi. Right to me.”

The hands gripping her arms loosened and finally fell away. Amber walked on legs like water past Meoraq and Nicci both to stand before Iziz, close enough for him to hit her if he wanted to. She didn’t think he’d kill her yet, but hitting was definitely an option. Her heart was pounding worse than it had ever done on the Candyman’s humming little injections a lifetime ago, punching at her ribs from the inside so hard she couldn’t believe that he couldn’t hear it too.

But if he heard it, he ignored it. He gazed into her eyes like a lover—smiling, marveling, savoring. Then he reached one hand into the pocket of his sword belt and held up an insignificant slip of bent metal. He pulled a bit of mganz-wood off one sharply-pointed end and there it was: a fish hook.

Iziz looked at it. He started to speak, then just stopped and sighed instead. He looked at her.

Where was he going to use that? On her neck, on the vein that had to be throbbing there in this panicked pulse as thick as a subway tube? In her eye, or even both eyes, before the real fun began? Or would he try to use it like she’d used it on Zhuqa, and how much damage could he do down there, ripping at her insides in search of a vein she didn’t even know if he’d find?

“He was my friend,” said Iziz. It was not an easy admission for him and he made it like they were the only ones there to hear it. “He was our leader, but he was my friend. How many of those do you think I have, Eshiqi?”

Behind her, Meoraq groaned against the ground. Amber strained in vain to see him through the raiders and it was only because she did that she finally saw the body and recognized it as Crandall.

“Little piss-licker took a jump at me,” Iziz remarked, watching her reaction. “Friend of yours?”

“He did?”

“Seemed to think he’d have help.” Iziz ran his eyes over the few remaining humans, ably held by his men. “And if he’d had it, maybe they could have had me. Not all of us, but me for certain. But they let him jump alone.”

She looked for and found Eric and Dag with the raiders. They wouldn’t look at her.

“I didn’t kill him right away,” Iziz was saying. He turned around so that he could stand at Amber’s side, see what she saw and think his own thoughts. “I told him he could live if he’d raise a fist to me. You may be ugly, but you can still be useful. So I gave him the choice: Keep my camp, carry the tack, catch a few cocks or show me he can fight them off, and who knows? Maybe someday he could have a sword on his belt and a slave for his own. It’s the sort of thing Zhuqa would have done,” he added meditatively. “So for his sake, I offered. He told me to fuck myself. But the rest of your men put their fists right in the air when I slit his throat, didn’t they…what’s your name? Nicci?”

Nicci did not respond. She and the ocean were in their own world.

“I thought she was you until you came out,” said Iziz, studying the two of them, first Nicci, then Amber. “I thought she was you and that maybe we’d killed you after all. They say the dead can walk again if they aren’t burned and Gann won’t have them. She looks like you,” he mused, eyeing Nicci slowly up and down. “But she bent her neck for me and you never would. Or would you?”

Behind them, a sudden scuffling as Meoraq tried groggily to rise and was beaten back down to the ground. It took a lot of beating. Iziz watched. Amber didn’t dare to, no more than she dared to look at Nicci. Iziz still had the fish hook in his hand; he was just looking for the best place to stick it in.

“What would you do, Eshiqi?” Iziz asked. His voice was low and too close to her left ear. She could see the dim dazzle of cloud-covered sun on the fish hook on her right. “If I told you I would let him go, would you raise your fist to me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d be lying.”

He grunted, a soft paff of air against her neck, and combed through a few strands of her hair with the hook. “I suppose I would be. Get him out of here. And don’t get stupid with him. That’s a Sword of Sheul you’re handling. Tie him up, keep both eyes open, and leave him the fuck alone until I say different. Go on.”

Two of them went, dragging Meoraq between them. He let himself be taken without resistance, but his eyes were open and they were not defeated.

She knew better than to ask. She knew and she asked anyway.

“What are you going to do to him?”

“Do you expect me to answer honestly?”

“Zhuqa would.”

His glance was ice on the edge of a knife. “He probably would. But he’s dead. And his killer is talking at me like that’s a safe or even a sane thing to do. Do you really want to know what I plan to do? Do you really think that will somehow help while you wait for it to happen?”

His throat was still black. She risked another question. “Did you burn him?”

He leaned back. “Who?” he asked, but his eyes told her he knew who.

“Zhuqa. Did you burn him at the funeral?”

Some of the raiders close enough to hear exchanged glances and murmured to others further back.

“What makes you think he even had a funeral?” Iziz asked finally.

“Because you were his friend and he would have wanted one.”

He stared at her. No one else moved. No one else spoke.

“That was a damned good hit,” Iziz said at last. “I mean it, Eshiqi. You aim for the gut like a fucking tachuqi. Yes, we burned him. You want to know how long it took or how it smelled?” His voice was rising, but she didn’t need it. The yellow was coming in at his throat now and coming in strong. “You’d think it would smell like meat cooking, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. It smelled fucking awful. Gann’s breath could not be more rank than the smoke from my only friend’s funeral. Why would you even ask…” He trailed off, his head tilting by degrees, like the head of a clockwork toy. “You want to make me angry, is that it? You think if I’m angry I’ll just spit up everything I’m going to do to you and you can make a plan. What do you need to plan for, eh? Do you think I’m going to kill you?”

“Eventually.”

“Oh, that’s a good word. Eventually.” He circled back to where he could stand and face her, folding his arms to tap the point of the hook against his own arm. “You haven’t asked how I know your language.”

That startled her. She hadn’t thought about it. With everything else there was to see and hear and wait for, the little matter of a lost language barrier had not even begun to send up its alarms. Iziz raised a hand and gestured without taking his eyes from Amber. He watched her while she looked and saw raiders drag a slumped, limping human unwillingly out into view.

He was naked, except for leather strips wrapping his feet and the metal band around his neck to which a chain might be attached if the need arose. His arms had the washed out color of a man who used to get a lot of sun before being stranded on this sunless world. The rest of him was a grub-pale pinkish-white, where he wasn’t bruised or scraped or just plain filthy. He stood where they made him stand and put his hands over his groin and stared at the ground.

“We call him Druud,” said Iziz. “He’s been very helpful.”

“Are you all right, Scott?” Amber asked finally, knowing perfectly well that he was not. They weren’t starving him. He had no scars, no branding burns, no obviously broken bones to show for his time in captivity, but he was not all right.

Iziz waited with her for an answer that never came, then took two easy strides forward and slapped Scott hard across the face, knocking him back into the chest of another raider, who had to catch him before he fell to the ground. “Eshiqi asked you a question,” he said.

“I’m fine,” said Scott. He didn’t look at Amber.

“Eh. He’s a liar.” Iziz gripped Scott’s chin to make him face this way and that before shoving him away again. “At his best, he’s never even close to fine. What would you say, Geozh?”

The raider holding Scott uttered a considering grunt. “He’s a hot grip when the urge comes on. That’s fine enough for me, sir.”

Scott flushed and stared fixedly at the ground.

“Zhuqa once said you were like a slow fuck into God, Eshiqi. I confess, I was expecting better, but Geozh is right. This one’s nothing but a little soft meat and a squeeze. He doesn’t even squirm anymore.” Iziz gave Amber a long, assessing glance, but did not seem to find what he was looking for. He grunted and stepped back, rubbing at his throat and frowning as he studied her. “I suppose you cast him out for a reason,” he said at last. “What did he do?”

Amber didn’t answer, not out of any planned defiance, but simply because she didn’t know what to say. There was no satisfaction in seeing Scott the prisoner of these horrible people, only the same sick horror she had felt in their grip herself. She’d survived it and he could survive it too, assuming any of them walked away from this…but she’d had Meoraq to take her in, to tell her she was his, to make her believe it. Scott had nothing and she had nothing to give him except silence when Iziz might be asking for a reason to hurt him.

Iziz grunted mildly after a suitable span of time had bled itself out, then turned around and walked over to Dag and Eric. “What did he do?”

“He tried to kill her,” said Dag.

Iziz flared his spines forward. “Truth?” he asked, almost but not quite laughing. “And all you did was exile him? You didn’t stab him in the head first?”

“She couldn’t,” Dag told him. “She was, um, hurt.”

“Hurt?” Iziz came back to her, his head still cocked, still smiling. “You didn’t look very hurt the last time I saw you. Did Zhuqa get a cut in after all? Did I? Tell me you bled for me, Eshiqi.”

“It was a—”

Iziz turned back in the same easy, friendly manner, drew his sword and hit Dag in the face with the hilt. The sound of bone crunching was somehow louder than Dag’s scream, and the spattering of blood and teeth falling over the ground was even louder than that. “When I talk to you, I’ll look at you,” Iziz said, and looked back at Amber. “How bad were you hurt when Druud tried to kill you? I’m curious. Wait.” He glanced behind him to the raiders standing over Dag, who was still screaming even as he tried to fit his shattered jaw back into place, and said, “Shut that thing up or get rid of it.”

The nearest raider helpfully kicked Dag in the side, then smacked him in the head with the pommel of his knife a few times, and finally grabbed him by the hair and started hauling him toward the hole in the shrine’s crumbling wall. Nicci moved out of the way.

“Stop it!” Amber shouted. “He’s hurt, for God’s sake! He can’t help it!”

Iziz swung toward her, moved in close, but did not hit her. “Pick someone to take his place,” he said, staring hard into her eyes. “I’ll let him go. I’ll even patch him up first. Druud, fetch me the humans and put them in a line. Pick someone to go over, Eshiqi.”

Amber couldn’t stop herself from looking as Scott assembled the last of his Manifestors—naked, shivering, mutilated, and still following him—but when they were all there, she clamped her jaws shut tight and stared back into Iziz’s eyes.

He waited, his spines ticking out the seconds. “Not even you?” he asked softly. “It’d be quick, at least. Quicker than all the eventual ways I had time to think on while I stirred Zhuqa’s burning bones.”

She closed her mouth.

“Please yourself. Geozh!”

Dag’s mushy pleas and promises to be quiet turned into screams, turned into receding shrieks, turned into nothing. Amber didn’t watch. She looked at Iziz looking back at her and said, “What do you want?”

“From you?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to consider the question fairly. It seemed to be the truth when he finally said, “I don’t know yet. But for right now, I want to know how bad you were hurt when Druud tried to kill you.”

For answer, since answers had become inevitable, Amber loosened her girdle and opened her tunic to show him the scar left by the kipwe’s attack. Iziz’s spines flared again as she undressed to this small degree. Faint smudges of yellow lightened his throat as he looked down at her chest, then her belly, and finally at the scar.

“Fuck Gann,” he said mildly. “Or fuck a kipwe, anyway. They used to have kipwe shows in the camp when I was young. I may have mentioned that once. Druud, get over here.”

Scott came, his head bent and jaw tightly clenched.

“Did she fight back?” Iziz asked, prodding at the worst of the scars with his fingertip.

“No,” Scott said sullenly.

“Could she? Or was she just lying there in a pool of her own fucking blood?”

“She wasn’t bleeding.”

“She wasn’t bleeding,” Iziz echoed, again in that almost-laughing way. “That bled, Druud. Tell me it didn’t again and I’ll tear your squirming little tongue out and feed it to you. You’ve seen me do it before. Dare me not to now.”

“She was bandaged up when…She was bandaged by then.”

“I see. You really are a shining drop of poison shit, aren’t you?” Iziz asked, almost admiringly. He fingered the edge of the scar for a moment more, plucked at it just once with the rough scale that acted as a fingernail, and then moved his hand unhurriedly lower, wedging it beneath her breeches with a grunt of effort to grip at her sex. He had to hook at her girdle to hold her from her instinctive flinch, but he wasn’t bothered by it. His expression remained serene if distracted as he felt between her legs for her opening and forced a finger inside.

Not a sound from him. Not a sound from anyone, unless the low mutters and speculative grunts from the watching raiders counted. Iziz worked a second finger in and rubbed them slowly back and forth, watching her watch the sky. At last, he wrenched the fishhook out of her girdle and cupped the back of her head instead, more or less making her face him.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he told her grimly. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy it much, but I’m going to do it. After that…well, I promised my men a fresh poke if we ever found you. So. Here’s what’s going to happen, Eshiqi, if you want to start making your plan. You’re going to catch every cock in my camp all the way down to little Thirqa unless you pick someone to take your place.”

Amber pressed her lips together and glared at him.

His spines flicked. “You don’t mean that.”

That felt horribly like the truth, but she shook her head and glared at him anyway.

“Point your finger for me, Eshiqi,” Iziz said, working his own a little deeper into her. “I promise not to kill them if you give them to me freely.”

She shivered, but kept silent.

Iziz waited, running his gaze over Eric and Nicci, and then the rest of his huddled human slaves, keeping his hand at work the whole time. When his eyes finally came back to her, he pulled his hand out of her breeches and wiped it on Scott’s chest. “Not a damn one of them would do the same for you,” he told her seriously. “You know that, don’t you?”

She said nothing.

“When I told Druud to pick one of his for mine to play with, he did it. He would have sold them if I’d offered him coin. He promised me you before I even knew he knew you.” He smiled with his head cocked and the yellow throbbing on his neck. “I’ll make it easy for you, just tonight. I’ll let you choose Druud.”

Scott made a cawing sound, but she didn’t look at him.

“It’s not the fresh poke I promised, but then again, it’s nothing new to Druud either,” Iziz said. “Point him out to me and I’ll even let you sit with your man tonight where you don’t have to watch. No?” The tilt came out of Iziz’s neck. He leaned very close, his breath hot and bitter on her lips. “Say it, then. Tell me no. Say it like the fierce little thing Zhuqa always said you were.”

Amber did not answer. Her jaws ached from keeping them clenched. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug at them in fists. Her heart hurt, but it kept beating.

Iziz turned his head slightly while keeping his eyes on Amber. “Nicci!” he called.

“You stay the fuck away from her!” Amber shouted, and she must have lunged too because there were hands all over her all at once, yanking her back and holding her tight. “Leave her alone! I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I’ll kill—”

Iziz slapped her. He didn’t let her see it coming like Zhuqa would have done. She scarcely saw him move at all. There was a black blur and a white light and then she was sagging back in a raider’s grip, staring dazedly at the sky while her face swelled with heat.

“You had the first choice,” Iziz spat. “You threw it away to score points off me. How many points was it worth, eh? Nicci!”

Nicci came. No one brought her. She just came. Her neck was bent, like a lizardlady’s, to an subservient angle. “Can I pick someone else?” she asked.

Iziz, one hand on the buckle of his belt, paused. His spines flicked, then flared curiously. “Who?”

Nicci looked at Amber.

But of course that didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t. They were sisters. They were all each other had. Amber had taken care of Nicci all her life. She’d tucked her in at night, got her up in the morning, walked her to school, done everything their mother was too strung out to care about. Amber was the one hiding with her in the bathroom when Bo Peep brought her bad dates home. Amber was the one stealing fruit cups and milk cartons off the lunch line so Nicci would have something to eat that night. Amber had fought off big kids and alley dogs and their mom’s drunken punches and every other goddamn thing the world had thrown at them and they loved each other, they were sisters, and this was not happening!

“Take her,” said Nicci. “She’s the one who deserves it. Not me. So you take her. You make her feel it.”

“You don’t mean that,” Amber heard herself say. Heard someone say, at any rate. It sounded more like their mother, when she was stoned and half-asleep.

“She looks like she means it,” Iziz remarked. “But I’m not bargaining with you, Nicci. Not tonight. On your belly.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Amber lunged again, but she was held fast. “Please! You can take me, just please let her go!”

Iziz finally looked at her, but he never had a chance to answer.

“Go?” said Nicci. “Go where? Look where we are! You…You made me come here!” Nicci shook her head in an incredulous, angry series of jerks. “How could you do that? How could you do that? You were supposed to take care of me!” she screamed suddenly, throwing open her arms. “Me! And you picked him! So fuck you, Amber! You hear me? Fuck you! I hope you choke on their fucking cum and die!”

“You don’t mean that!”

“Let’s find out.” Iziz offered the fish hook.

Nicci looked at it, then snatched it from his hand and stepped up, holding it in her shaking fist.

The hands pinning Amber to this moment tightened, but she wasn’t struggling. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even feel the air in her lungs. This wasn’t happening. It just…just wasn’t.

“I hate you,” said Nicci. “I want you to see this. I want you to know that this happened because of you.”

She swung. But not at Amber, motionless, stunned.

The curved edge of the fish hook sank as easily into Nicci’s throat as it had into the soft inner meat of Zhuqa’s body. She screamed again and ripped, grunting with the effort to make the hook move. A hot, heavy gush struck Amber in the eyes. She slapped at them, screaming and tasting her sister’s blood—swallowing it—and still somehow heard Iziz’s quiet, “Ah,” just exactly the way he’d said it over Zhuqa’s corpse.

The fury of Nicci’s features slackened, twisting into something merely bewildered in the moment before she staggered. Amber lunged to catch her, punching at the lizardman who tried to restrain her, but Nicci’s weight was too much to hold and her hands were slippery. They went down together in a hot, wet heap with Amber on top, trying desperately to push the blood back in through the open gash in her baby sister’s neck. It didn’t last long; she could have counted the seconds by the slowing spews of fresh gore if she could have counted anything at all, but there weren’t many. Nicci clutched once at her arm and once at her hair. Her lips moved, but there was no sound, no way to say for sure just what she would have said. It looked like ‘help’. Or ‘hate’. Then she was dead—warm clay in the shape of Nichole Sarah Bierce—and nothing was left to move her blood except gravity.

“That was even better than I hoped for,” said Iziz, but so far away and through so many muffling layers of cotton that she could barely understand him. “Stand her up.”

Someone must have tried because it seemed to Amber that she fell upwards for a moment, then downwards, then both at once and then she was gone too.

 

* * *

 

The lights came on, vast bright lights with no particular source, whiting out the world to a clean, featureless blank in which Amber stood alone. After a while, it occurred to her that she was standing in a line, and sure enough, there was a string of people in front of and behind her. They were all in white, like the lights, like the walls and floor and ceiling. She was in the Manifestors’ skyport, she realized, and there it was, the Pioneer, not in space at all but sitting right there on the tarmac, waiting to board.

She looked to her left and there was Nicci, hugging her duffel bag and crying because she didn’t want to go. She looked down and by God, she was fat again, her belly straining at the stiff fabric of her brand new colonist’s shirt.

None of it had happened yet. She could stop now, walk away. There’d be fines to pay, but she could figure something out. Get another job. Lose the weight (again). Hell, she could leave the city and watch on the tiny television above the bar where she worked just down the road from the trailer where she and Nicci lived as the whole world wondered what had happened to the Pioneer, and on the other side of the universe, Meoraq would go to Xi’Matezh without her.

Scott was waiting to scan her thumb, only she didn’t know he was Scott yet. She didn’t ever have to know. She could still walk away.

And Meoraq would walk home from Xi’Matezh alone.

“Let him.”

She turned to her right and there was her mother, somewhere between Bo Peep and Mary Bierce, wearing a white t-shirt and no makeup, smoking a cigarette. She smiled with half her mouth, not mean but just tired, the look of a woman who knows. “You can’t save everyone, little girl.”

Maybe it was the dream that made her do it, although none of this felt like a dream yet. Maybe it was her bitchy nature. Maybe it was just because it was Mama saying it, but Amber suddenly had to argue.

“I could save them,” she said. “I could shout the place up right now, tell them the ship’s going to crash, tell them everyone who goes is going to die.”

“Go ahead,” said her mother. She tossed her hair back and looked at the ship, her eye lingering over all those people going in. She looked…sad. Honestly sad, not angry or self-pitying or bitter but just…sad. “They’ll drag you out of here and launch anyway.”

“So what if they do? If I could just delay them five minutes, maybe five minutes is all it would take.”

“For…?”

“For the ship. You know, for whatever happened out there to miss us.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe,” said Amber defensively, but now her mother’s sad eyes were staring into hers and she remembered all at once that there had been four more days of boarding after this. Five minutes, give or take, just didn’t mean that much in the end. “Maybe,” she said again, but she didn’t believe it.

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and it rains in New York.”

“Huh?”

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan,” said her mother, “which blows pollen into the nose of a cow, which sneezes, which startles the rest of the herd into running, which changes the air currents by just a tiny fraction of a degree, which picks up momentum and instability as it travels across the ocean until it becomes a storm front, and it rains in New York.” She paused for a puff. Her eye sparked red with reflected light from the cherry. Meoraq’s eye. “Is that what you were thinking, little girl?”

“That sounds like total horseshit,” Amber admitted.

“That’s because it is. It relies on the idea that while all these little things are happening, the rest of the world is holding still to let them happen and that simply isn’t the way the world works. The reality is, it would have rained in New York anyway. The reality is, a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and a fence gets broken, but that just doesn’t have as much punch.”

Amber hadn’t moved in all this time, hadn’t taken a single step, but she found herself at the head of the line. Scott was waiting in his clean red uniform, one of thousands of brand-new crewmen, a cog in the machine that was about to blow up.